It’s late on a Friday afternoon at the Nashville International Airport when Dr. Marty Sellers hops out of a van and strides towards a small private jet idling on the runway. Sellers and his organ retrieval team from Tennessee Donor Services are flying to Chattanooga to try to recover a liver and two kidneys from an organ donor.
"We’re doing an NRP recovery," says Sellers , referring to normothermic regional perfusion , a new kind of organ retrieval procedure Sellers calls "revolutionary." "It replenishes the oxygen deprivation that the organs incur during the dying process," says Sellers. "If we recover the organ and put it on ice in an oxygen-deprived state, it’s not as healthy when it gets into the recipient.
And this way, it’s actually recovered in a healthier state so that when it does get to the recipient it’s more likely to work." NRP is generating excitement as an important innovation that produces more, high-quality livers, kidneys, and hearts that could help alleviate the chronic shortage of organs . More than 100,000 people are on waiting lists for organs, most for kidneys, and 17 are estimated to die every day because the number of available organs hasn’t been able to keep pace with the demand.
About half of the nation’s 56 organ procurement organizations have already started using NRP and more are planning to start soon, according to the Association of Organ Procurement Organizations . But NRP has sparked an intense ethical debate. The American Journ.
